Tropico 3 is a surprisingly good city builder or rather a 3rd world simulator. It is very different than games like Sim City and Cities XL. Those two games are more macro city builders, where in two or three mouse clicks you can make city blocks where 1,000 people might live. With Tropico and the Tropico series in general, you need to place each building, each road and your island along with the time it takes your construction company to build it. Your entire island might get to be 200 - 500 'Tropicans.'

Each Tropican has needs... Food, religion, job, healthcare, entertainment, safety and so on. The catch is every Tropican's needs have a certain weight to them based on what political party / faction they believe in. Each faction has major and minor demands. The military will want more soldiers, so you need to build an army base. The religious faction will want a church or cathedral. The capitalist party will want privatization or upscale entertainment. The communist party will want you to enable the free public housing edict or have adequate healthcare.

On top of that, you balance political relations with the USA and USSR. If they get too bad, one of the two will basically take over your country and it will be game over. It is interesting how many ways that you can get game over. The most common way to get a game over is to lose an election. You don't have to have elections even. You're in charge. If you don't want an election, the nationalist party will hate you and your loyalist party will love you. If you opt to have elections, it will be vise versca. People will call for early elections and when you have elections, you can see preliminary results and you can even sway (cheat) elections. Its all at the risk of a party's love.

It is pretty cool having to pick 3 things to make a speech about and then fulfill campaign promises, but its all pretty easy. Winning elections is pretty easy, especially compared to how difficult it was to win any elections in the original Tropico. It was so bad in that game, that it was almost impossible to win an election without stuffing the ballot box.

When citizens hate you, and there will be plenty that do, they will either peacefully protest or become rebels. Once you have enough rebels against you, they will attack your most remote buildings. Your army will then go fight them, but if the rebels outnumber your army, the rebel will win and the buildings will be destroyed. The rebels can attack your palace or flat out assassinate you for a game over.

Tropico has a single player campaign with a lot of scenarios. You don't just pick scenarios, you unlock them. Each scenario seems to have scenario specific events that only occur in the scenarios. Some scenarios last 30 minutes, others a few hours as you take an island from 1950 - 1990 or so. At the start of each scenario you can pick a player character from historical tropican dictators or make your own avatar. You can even make personality traits that will result in pros and cons. It can drastically change your play style if you are incorruptible and never have any crime or have a green thumb and have high farm yields at the cost of low factory production.

Your businesses, mines, farms, and everything requires citizens in them to function and make you money. Every citizen has different education levels that will impact who does what. So you need to build high schools and colleges. Once built, there are options to gear students to military or religion. You can also click vacant positions to hire foreign experts for a price. If you have more businesses than citizens, build an immigration office and let anyone into the country or change it to only let in skilled workers so you keep bums out of your country.

Nothing is done automatically. You place a building, then wait for your teamsters and construction crews to build it. The more crews and personnel you have working, the faster it'll get done. I'm happy with that. Its part of the realism. If there's a building you want developed faster, you can increase or decrease its priority. If its still taking too long, just have your avatar stand next to the building to get it done faster.

The graphics are beautiful and you'll see every Tropican walking around, hopping in their car and driving to locations. The music is nice and very Tropican / Salsa music. The radio DJ and the rebel DJ will provide a lot of flavor to what you're doing. The rebel DJ will always heckle you and every line is said with tongue in cheek humor. The game knows you're all powerful and while being a dictator is usually seen as a horrifyingly negative thing, the humor twists it into a silly positive thing.

The only letdown is the fact there are no Steam achievements, yet it is the Steam Special Edition.

I recommend Tropico 3 for many reasons:1. The aim of the game is to rule, and to rule for many years. You have work hard to do just that, managing the economy, maintaining your popularity, evading coups, balancing the factions on the island are a few examples. I enjoyed having to deal with all these.

2. The graphics are nice, I haven't played the earlier versions of the game (the original Tropico or Tropico 2) but this one has nice buildings and landmarks to choose from. The user interface is also well designed (unlike Tropico 4 - see below).

3. The game gives you an objective for each scenario, and you have only so many years to complete that objective. Having a single objective gives you a lot of freedom, you get to decide about other matters on the island.

4. The game has really good music, the tracks certainly fit the 'Tropical' atmosphere.

5. There is a plethora of different scenarios. Although it gets repetitive as you play, the game still has a good replay level.

Comparing Tropico 3 & 4:So, if you are new to the Tropico series (like I once was), I would recommend getting Tropico 3 instead of Tropico 4. In my opinion, it definitely has a better user interface, a nicer objective system (Tropico 4 keeps giving you objectives - it is, as far as I have seen, endless and boring) and better music. One thing Tropico 3 may be lacking is imports (you can only export goods in T3), which is included in T4, but other than that, T4 is no better than T3, and I think T3 outweighs T4.

This game is like sim city but better for one reason. you can be a total ♥♥♥♥. dont like someone? have them killed. people protesting over low wages? lock em up. need some cash? let superpowers test nuclear weapons offshore of your tiny island nation. runs very well on average hardware and i have never encountered a single bug in many hours of gameplay. well polished and worth every cent

The first time I bought Tropico I was looking for something different. Tired of the same old shoot-em-up stuff. Tropico had just come on the market and looked interesting. I was supprised at how much fun it was. i found it very addictive and ended up spending a lot of time in it. I tryed Tropico Pirate's cove but couldn't get into it. I saw that Tropico 3 had gone back to more the way it was and I wanted to play it again so I bought it. I am not sorry I did. There are some things I don't care as much for but overall I think it is a great game. I would recomend this to anyone.